Aria - Season One DVD Review

Share.

A show where you're meant to just sit back and enjoy the ride.

By D. F. Smith

Aria has a few things in common with another recent Right Stuf release, Maria Watches Over Us. Both series feature young women and their inspiring older mentor figures. Both series have plots where not a damn thing happens a lot of the time. Both series may be less about what happens on the screen than what happens in the fevered imaginations of their viewers. (It goes without saying that both have a strong following among amateur dojinshi artists in Japan.)

Maria-sama ratchets up the tension level whenever possible, though, and never mind that all the drama revolves around something completely inconsequential. Aria, on the other hand, is calm and relaxed. It freely admits that the plot is not the point. Of course, these are either good points or bad points, depending on your taste.

We're putting the cart before the horse here – it might not hurt to introduce this show before we deconstruct it. Aria is a science-fiction story, sort of, although it doesn't have much in common with your usual tale of life on an alien planet. In this case, the alien planet is Mars, where the polar ice caps have been melted down and the climate is now surprisingly temperate. In recognition of its newly watery surface, the natives call their home world "Aqua" now, and enjoy an idyllic existence that they mainly seem to spend sitting around remarking on how idyllic everything is.

In this first 13-episode season, we meet Aqua's newest emigrant. Akari Mizunashi is a teenage girl, and she's moving out to Mars to become an "undine" for the famous Aria Company. See, since the planet is covered in water, everyone gets around on boats now, and gondola rides are popular tourist attractions. Undines ferry visitors in long white boats around the sights of the new Martian cities.

To answer the question you're probably about to ask, yes, this is a show about gondoliers on Mars. That's more like the hook than the core of the show, though – we don't spend too much time exploring the nitty-gritty details of the gondola business.

What Aria's really about is how Akari floats through life in a constant blissed-out haze, marveling at how lovely the world around her is and how nice everyone is and how beautiful life can be. Most of the characters are so inhumanly pleasant and cheerful that one starts to wonder what they put in the water on Aqua. Aika, Akari's best friend and fellow undine-in-training, has to tell her to stop being such a wide-eyed grinning sap maybe two or three times each episode.

This is an odd departure for Junichi Sato, the director. Most of his other series have featured some fairly intense action, even if they seem slight and cutesey to start with. Kaleido Star and Princess Tutu might look like Aria while they're holding still, but not when they start moving, and Tutu in particular had some shockingly dark undertones.

Apparently, Sato got tired of drama and decided to make something more like a travelogue instead. Although Aria might not have any exciting conflict to speak of, it's unquestionably lovely to look at. The setting is very pretty, designed as a deliberately idealized version of Venice, and the girls are prettier still.

If that's what you're looking for in a Japanese cartoon, give this one a shot. It may put you to sleep, but you'll drift off to some unusually pleasant dreams.